The Super Mental Training Book (23 page)

This stiff warning of Dr. Morgan's may be overstated, and is diametrically opposed to the position Dr. Kroger takes on the subject of what hypothetical dangers hypnosis poses the athlete. (For purposes of discussion, it is valid to compare dissociation with hypnosis, because Dr. Morgan calls dissociation "a kind of self-hypnosis." ) Dr. Kroger, in his Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, remarks that "there are no indications that he (the athlete) will drop dead 'in the stretch,' at least not from the effects of hypnosis." We have also noted in the Introduction Dr. Kroger's observation regarding the athlete who uses hypnosis: "There is no danger that an athlete will go beyond his physiologic limit. The built-in or involuntary reflexes protect the individual against danger at all levels." Dr. Morgan feels that a runner who dissociates might "suffer serious injury," but this is speculation. Until evidence is obtained showing that runners employing dissociation

have incurred more severe injuries than runners who do not use the technique, Dr. Kroger's position of reassurance seems the most logical.

Along these lines, Ingrid Kristiansen, who set the world record in the women's marathon at the 1985 London Marathon (with a time of 2:21:06), hoped to break 2:20 in the 1986 Boston Marathon. Runner's World writer Amby Burfoot reported her intentions:

"If you want to run very fast, you must be willing to gamble, and I am," Kristiansen said, repeating words she hears almost daily on audio tapes prepared by her sports psychologist. "It's better to take chances than to always play it safe. To try to run a 2:24— that would be too safe. If I see a 1:07 at the halfway, I will not be afraid."[17]

Burfoot did not identify who Kristiansen's sports psychologist is, nor what type of mental rehearsal activity the audio tapes had her engage in (though her repeating phrases contained on the tape indicates that hypnosis or self-hypnosis was involved). In any case, Kristiansen experienced menstrual cramps during the '86 Boston Marathon, and had to settle for a 2:24:55 time. Again, the mental training strategy used in this instance—perhaps hypnosis—did not cause Kristiansen to self-destruct, as Dr. Morgan warned; instead, the physiologic limit prevailed, as Dr. Kroger stated it would. Burfoot commented about Kristiansen's performance that "not fearing fear proved to be not enough"—the point being, the mind can only do so much; without the body completely healthy and ready to go, a top athletic performance is not in the cards. (Later on in 1986, Kristiansen set world records in both the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters, establishing her supremacy in women's long-distance racing.)

The major portion of this chapter, like so much of the rest of this book, is geared towards the competitive athlete, one who enters races, meets, etc., constantly striving to improve his performance (distances, times, average, and so on). There are many athletes, though, who never compete. They "train" all the time, but only for physical fitness purposes and/or for fun. Long-distance running, due to its health-promoting nature, is one sport which attracts many such people. Strange to say, there have been a few books possessing a mental training orientation written for this type of non-competitive runner. I will briefly describe two of these books, and discuss the contents of a third at length.

Fred Rohe's The Zen of Running (1974) contains many pleasant pictures (beaches, forests, countryside, etc.), and puts the reader in the mood to enjoy running. According to Rohe, running "is a newly discovered form of meditation or one more way for you to discover you." The book generally attempts to encourage the reader to have fun while running, and represents a total departure from performance-oriented sports books.

Joel Henning's Holistic Running (1978) presents thorough advice and information on breathing exercises and meditation techniques for the runner. Henning details a 6-step program to develop one into the so-called holistic runner, whereby the person's body, mind, and soul are integrated (the bottom line being that a tranquil mental state is achieved during one's running session). This book promotes running as a mystical experience and as a means to personal growth, and is well-documented throughout.

The Dreamrunner (1982) by Jim Ballard clearly wins hands down for uniqueness. Regrettably, only a small private printing of the book was made, and therefore few people know about The Dreamrunner and its teachings. Basically, Ballard regards life as a dream, and contends that one can use certain "let's pretend" mental techniques while running to produce "an exhilaration, a felt harmony between body and mind." Ballard describes 46 different techniques, or "recipes for the sole" as he calls them, to help one become the dreamrunner. Before looking at these techniques, we should better understand where Ballard is coming from. Ballard reveals his outlook to us in his Preface to The Dreamrunner, stating:

When I started running eight years ago, right away I noticed that something kind of extraordinary was happening. The longer I ran and the more I observed myself, the more clearly I saw that a kind of intuitive shift was occurring for me in my experience of time and space while running. Further, I found that I could induce that shift by purposely practicing an imaginary reality or "dream" version of what was happening. . .

A result of my running researches into the altered experience of time and space was that I became convinced that time and space are not "real"; that is, they are not properties of the world at all, as we think they are. Rather, they are ways we have of organizing and explaining to ourselves what's "real", what is "out there" in the world. . .

Three years ago I spent four months living alone on an island, running and writing and observing myself. My stated purpose in being out there was to study the world and my life in it from the standpoint of its being truly a dream. Briefly stated, the results of my personal research into living as if life is a dream are as follows: (1) it works just as well as living as if it's not; (2) it's far less stressful; and (3) it works best if you keep it pretty much to yourself.

Ballard definitely is not interested in the competitive aspect of running—that is, winning races and lowering times. Instead, his emphasis is on altering reality, having fun and reducing stress. He says, "If life is a dream, then its purpose must be to be entertained;" and, according to Ballard, one of the best ways to entertain oneself is to engage in dreamrunning. He offers 46 mental techniques to help you shift your perception of reality while running, making the exercise more enjoyable and effortless, and life itself more pleasurable. Here is a sampling of some of these intriguing dream-running techniques:

NOW-HOLE

Fix your eyes steadily on the continuum of surface in front of you on which you run. Find the rushpoint, that area closest to your feet at which the surface details will just stay in focus, while all around it a blur of points are in motion, rushing outward toward you. Concentrate on that point for a time, and think of it as a hole through which the world you see is born each moment. Find a line in the rushpoint area just in front of which all details blur. Watch it, thinking of it as a cliff over which the things of now are falling. (If you close your eyes after running and concentrate on a point in front of you, you will see a moving replica of the now-hole.)

PHOTO NEGATIVE

Make the world be a photo negative of itself. As you run, make all solid objects, yourself included, be "air" and the air be "solid." Note the shapes of air (solid) that surrounds objects like trees and cars, which are now space. You are a flowing, person-shaped vacuum. Feel the nothingness of your body meet the solidness of the air that moves through it. Feel the solid that pushes into your space and draws itself back out, with each breath.

TURNING AROUND

When you change directions, especially after running in one for a long time, a shift in psychic alignment can be felt. If you're not running a loop and must turn around to go back, an abrupt realigning can be wrenching. Soften the turnback by running backwards in the old direction for a while, slowing down, and then beginning to move for-

ward. Or, spin some lazy circles on the run as you begin to slow for the return. With each rotation, feel your vision and your body gradually letting go of one point of the compass and taking up another. (An occasional spinturn or backwards-running as you're moving along can wake you up by showing you what's in the rearview mirror.)

IMAGE TALK

Pretend you can communicate with things through mini-pictures. If a dog makes a fuss, image it still. Or yourself and it by a fire, with your hand stroking its back. If you open yourself to this, do not be surprised if you get some messages back in pictures from dogs, cats, butterflies, birds, squirrels, etc. (To start, act as if what your mind images as it thinks is somehow influenced by the animal you're seeing.) You may find certain trees, crossroads, old houses and other places sharing memories with you.

SKYHOOK

Feel your running body hung in air, legs turning like a windmill, while again and again the earth takes a breath, rising to cushion your footfall, then descending again. Watch the earth rise and fall with each step, bouncing you along.

GIANT

Gaze down as from a great height at the details of your running surface. Observe them from 30,000 feet. Feel your great size and massiveness as you tower over a giant road. Remind yourself of a tiny creature, a minute replica of yourself, who runs "down there." And also of the one running in the sky behind you, gazing down. Run on into your giant, miniature world.

Before condemning these mental exercises as the ideas of a crackpot, it would be best to try them out. Personally, I believe there is much to be said for Ballard's ideas. For example, I tried out the Photo Negative technique on a breezy day, and it was quite easy to regard the air as "solid" and myself as nothingness. This was especially true going into the wind. Ballard's comments about backwards running in his mental exercise titled "Turning Around" also possess a lot of merit. As the author of the book, Backwards Running (1981), I can second Ballard's contention that running backwards will "wake you up by showing you what's in the rearview mirror." A section of my book, in fact, alludes to this beneficial feature of backwards running. The best quote I received on this subject came from Pat Murphy, one of the world's most incisive physical fitness authorities. He put it this way:

Man hasn't changed to this day. You have the lookers and you have the doers. When you're running backwards, the lookers are always the first to put in their little words of wisdom like "Hey, the world's going around the other way!" or "Do you realize where you're going?" When I pass people, they'll sometimes yell at me, "Why do you run backwards?" The easiest way to explain it, and not get too involved in a conversation, is to say, "I just wanted to see where I was, because I passed through so quickly." It kind of gives them a little chuckle, if nothing else. But, the lookers are always the ones who want to know something, because while the doers are out there doing it, the lookers want to know, "Why are you running backwards?" and "What are the benefits?" And, if the reasons you give them have any type of intellectual jab to them, the lookers might one day try it themselves.

As the old saying goes: too old too soon, too smart too late. The lookers find out in their later years what they should have been doing from the age of 15.[18]

Again, Ballard's mental exercises are not meant to help athletes win races, achieve PRs, etc. But, even competitive athletes are entitled to a change of pace occasionally so as not to get burned out. This being the case, employing dreamrunning techniques might prove valuable even in the context of a high-powered sports program. If nothing else, they provide the runner-athlete an alternative way to derive enjoyment from his workout.

We have seen in this chapter several examples of track and field champions who have benefitted from self-hypnosis, hypnosis, and visualization; we also noted how these kinds of mental disciplines hold great promise for long-distance runners. Non-competitive runners, we then witnessed, can use some interesting mental exercises to obtain greater satisfaction from their workouts. From all this it appears that the 5 P's—Pre-Planning Prevents Poor Performance—apply as much to mental preparation as they do to physical conditioning and the practicing of technical details. So, check out some of the many available mental rehearsal techniques, and see how they help you in your sport.

FOOTNOTES

1. Bulletin of the Association to Advance Ethical Hypnosis, Vol. 79, 1978.

2. Warren R. Johnson, "Hypnosis and Muscular Performance," Contemporary Readings in Sport Psychology, ed. William P. Morgan, (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), pp. 410-23.

3. John Strege, "Jumping for Attention," Orange County Register, July 29, 1985, p. C9.

4. Brian Hilderbrand, "The Dreamer: Reaching Goals Is Rusty Knowles' Specialty," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 17, 1985, Part III, p. 16.

5. "Mind Over Matter," Runner's World, September, 1989, p. 18.

6. Beth Ann Krier, "Olympians Exercising in Mind Arena," Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1983, Part I, p. 1.

7. "'Head' Coaching Helps Athlete Make Olympics," Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1983, Part I, pp. 19-20.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. That Toomey felt the need to be hypnotized again is noteworthy because supposedly he practiced visualization. Los Angeles Times writer Beth Ann Krier reports that "Bill Toomey... recalls using visualization automatically although it was never prescribed. 'It's your third workout. You can do it before you go to bed every night,' he advises" (see "Olympians Exercising in Mind Arena," L. A. Times, June 7, 1983). Like Willie Banks and other champion athletes, Toomey practiced his version of visualization in bed at night. Even so, he sought more mental assistance from hypnosis, which he might have regarded as a more powerful and effective mental preparation technique than visualization.

11. Thomas J. Nardi, "Hypnosis in Feudal Japan," Hypnosis Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 1978, pp.16-19.